When the Colorado Shakespeare Festival scoured the nation for a new boss to lead it into its historic 50th season, few realized the big shot discovered out in California had scoured pots as a teenager at the Heritage Square Opera House.

Or that he had skipped his Golden High junior prom to go camping with his best friend, future “Ally McBeal” star Greg Germann. Or that 27 years ago, he played bit parts for the very same Colorado Shakespeare Festival alongside Annette Bening.

Philip Sneed has come home to Boulder to lead the nation’s second-oldest Shakespeare festival, which bowed Saturday night with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – the first of five new offerings that will open on consecutive Saturdays on the University of Colorado campus.

Sneed, 48, was an awkward kid, very much a loner. But from the moment he performed in his first play, he resolved without equivocation to become the next Olivier. He was 12, a seventh-grader at Arvada Junior High. And the jet propulsion for this life-changing epiphany? Playing a teddy bear in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Solider.”

“I was very shy, and theater gave me an opportunity, even at age 12, to be a successful human being on the planet,” Sneed said. “That was something I just couldn’t do in my own shell – but I could if I were playing another character.”

Sneed was such a theater geek, he followed a nomadic mid-’70s staging of the exuberant New Testament musical “Godspell” all over Denver, seeing it a dozen times. It starred Jerry Webb and Robert Wells, who now runs the Avenue Theater.

For Sneed, like Denver Center Theatre Company artistic director Kent Thompson the son of a Southern Baptist minister, “Godspell” was a life-affirming, life-altering event.

“Having grown up in a very conservative, strict religious upbringing, ‘Godspell’ not only opened up theater to me, but religion,” he said. “My experience of the Bible was not loving … it was disciplined. Through ‘Godspell,’ I found someone who, through art, found something joyous and and positive about the Bible. That had a profound influence on my work because it melded my interests in theater and art.”

Hope in the bleak 1970s

One of Sneed’s crushing high-school disappointments was not getting cast in “Godspell.” Even Germann got in – and he couldn’t even sing. Sneed says it’s kismet to have now hired Scott Schwartz, son of “Godspell” composer Stephen Schwartz, to direct “A Servant of Two Masters” for him, opening July 7.

But the world Sneed graduated into from Golden High School in 1976 was, sadly, not so different from what faces today’s teenagers, having been informed by both Iraq and Virginia Tech. What’s a kid to do?

As a young teen, Sneed recalls, “I was seeing people get killed in Vietnam, but with Kent State, I was also seeing people getting killed at college. The future looked pretty bleak. Theater gave me hope.”

Sneed spent his days at the University of Colorado soaking up knowledge in lieu of a starring actor’s adulation. He worked at theaters like the Bonfils and Arvada Center, but his biggest role in three years at the Shakespeare Festival (1978-80) was playing Dumaine to Bening’s Princess of France in “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”

So no one would have guessed then that he’d be back one day to administer a prestigious $1.2 million annual festival.

“No way … no way at all,” said Gavin Cameron-Webb, Sneed’s director in 1980 and his employee in 2007. “But who could have ever told you that George Bush was going to be president based on his time at Yale?”

Sneed is the CSF’s first new artistic director in 17 years, and the first equally charged with running both the creative and financial shows – duties for which he swears he brings equal enthusiasm. He’s already instituted a number of changes, such as non-Shakespearean titles and earlier start times, which have reaped a 16 percent increase in advance sales.

Sam Sandoe, a CSF actor since 1970 and Sneed’s two-year college roommate, attributes the surge in enthusiasm to the new boss’ “Why not?” attitude. Why not stage five plays instead of three? Why not present a play at Christmas? (Sneed will mount a “A Child’s Christmas in Wales this December, a first for the otherwise all-summer festival).

Cameron-Webb cites Sneed’s “great sense of caring for the institution and caring for the people who work for it.” He’s an insider with an outsider’s eye.

Surfing a wave of enthusiasm

But Sneed brings more to Boulder than his eye. He also brings his wife, costumer Clare Henkel, and daughter, actor Emily Van Fleet. Actually, Van Fleet had been establishing herself in the local theater community long before the CSF job opened up. Her dad, who had been overseeing both the Sierra Shakespeare Festival and the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare festivals for a decade, was a finalist for several jobs. So coming home to Emily was icing on the cake.

Sneed swears none of his 2007 directors knew of her bloodline when she auditioned. Certainly not Schwartz, who cast her in “Servant.” But Sneed knows he only gets that pass once.

“I would never, ever want to be nepotistic,” he said. “On the other hand, one does not want to punish one’s relatives because they are related to you. Audience and critical response will have to back up whether that was a good choice or not.”

“He truly believes, as I do, that there is nothing in the world like live theater,” she said. “It’s been such an inspiration to me as an actor just to watch him work. I think Boulder is just the place for him to share his passion.”

Sneed has enjoyed great success as an actor, notably playing “Hamlet” for the Indiana Rep, and he plans to tread the Boulder boards himself again one day, perhaps as early as next season. In the meantime, he’s enjoying the wave of goodwill – not to mention the 25 percent bump to his operating budget.

He promises Shakespeare will remain at the heart of the festival, even promising to soon complete the entire canon for a second time, a task few companies ever accomplish once.

“I am so charged,” Sneed said. “The pressures are huge, but the support is also huge, and morale is so high. I can’t wait to get started.”

Raising a new curtain

*Earlier, 6:30 p.m. curtain times on Tuesdays and Sundays (they were 8:30 p.m.)

*New, more comfortable seatbacks; and not for a rental fee – they’re free, and for everyone.

*More plays, fewer players: Five summer plays instead of three. Company reduced from 46 to 32. More roles for each actor.

*Staggered openings: One new play opens every Saturday for five straight weeks. Added holiday show, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”

*High-tech microphones on the stage (not on the actors).

*Operating budget increased from $900,000 to $1.2 million.

*Reduced children’s ticket prices. Last year, only 2 percent of the CSF audience was under 18. This year it’s already running at 10 percent.

*Upcoming major new-play initiative; more local, regional, national and international collaborations.

– John Moore

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Colorado Shakespeare Festival 2007 offerings

With comments from new producing artistic director Philip Sneed:

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (through Aug. 18, outdoors): Set 19th-century Victorian. A tale of full-moon forested mischief. “The perfect play, because it blends comedy, romance and drama. I have never understood before how much this is a play about theater.”

“Around the World in 80 Days” (based on novel by Jules Verne, June 30-Aug. 18, indoors): Phileas Fogg and his companion have a fantastic romp by elephant, train, steamboat and more. Randy Moore plays 17 roles. “This is a play that celebrates the art of telling stories and the transformative art of the actor. But there is no hot air balloon, because Jules Verne did not write a hot air balloon But anyone who has ever been in one knows they are inefficient for getting around the world quickly.”

“A Servant of Two Masters” (adapted from Carlo Goldoni by Colorado native Constance Congdon, July 7-Aug. 17, outdoors): Classic comedy about crafty clown Truffaldino. “This is the funniest play this audience will have ever seen, and it’s funnier than anything Shakespeare ever wrote.”

“All’s Well That Ends Well” (July 14-Aug. 17, indoors): Set in 1660 London. Helena woos the arrogant husband who abandoned her. “It’s about gender politics, which is why we set it the year women were first allowed to appear on stage.”

“Julius Caesar” (July 21-Aug. 16, outdoors): Set in an unidentified European country 30 years from now. Cautionary power tale about the political giant who fell with 33 bloody wounds. “We are not casting Caesar as George Bush, but we are saying, ‘Here’s a play about someone who is trying to grab more power for his position than has ever been seen.”‘

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Colorado Shakespeare Festival 2008 offerings

Sneed began a new tradition Saturday night – announcing the next season’s offerings on the opening night of the season before. So before Saturday’s 2007 opening performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Sneed revealed his choices for Season 51. The quotes that follow are his:

“Macbeth”: “This timeless tale of unchecked ambition is arguably more relevant than ever in what will be an election year.”

“Woody Guthrie’s American Song”: This will be the 20th anniversary production of the musical created by Jeff Glazer and Jeff Waxman, the same team that made “Almost Heaven: Songs and Stories of John Denver” the longest-running show in Denver Center Theatre Company history. Sneed’s commitment to non-Shakespeare works, such as this year’s “Around the World in 80 Days,” was thought to be limited to Shakespearean peers or other classicists. “Our nation can claim many artists whose work qualifies as classic. And in our relatively young nation, our classics are often of a more recent vintage.”

“The Three Musketeers”: Based on the 1844 Alexandre Dumas novel, it recounts the adventures of a young man named d’Artagnan, who leaves home to become a musketeer like his three inseparable pals, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (“One for all, and all for one”). This one’s for kids and families. “I can think of few better theatrical goals than introducing young people to the classics.”

“Henry VIII”: Sneed is committed to CSF completing Shakespeare’s canon a second time, and the fest has staged this rarely staged show only once, in 1971. “The festival’s reputation is based in part on our having completed the Shakespearean canon, but there are a few we’ve seen only once. … We present this play not just for bragging rights but because it speaks to us about power, especially about how a nation’s leader can be influenced by powerful, ambitious members of his inner circle.”

“Love’s Labor’s Lost”: This is one CSF hasn’t tackled in 10 years. “It’s one of Shakespeare’s most poetic and musical comedies.”

All you show tune skeptics, you who snicker at the spectacle of unison-dancing cats or roll your eyes at the first chords of “Don’t Rain on My Parade”: Who’s getting the last laugh now? Because suddenly, being in and grooving on and talking about musicals is the hippest thing going.